A Spanish woman faces a possible six-year jail sentence after being accused of claiming her dead father’s pension, worth €130,000 (£115,500) during a period of 21 years.

Court documents state that the woman, from the province of Malaga in southern Spain, failed to inform the bank where the pension was paid when, some year’s after her mother’s death, her father died in March 1995.

Instead, until 2016 she allegedly continued claiming her father’s pension from the Spanish government department responsible for maritime sector workers, using a longstanding joint account she had opened with her parents.

According to local newspaper SUR, the local public prosecutor’s office has so far only been able to recover €217 from the woman’s current account. In a gesture of goodwill, the bank where the joint account was held has already returned a further €27,043 of the pension to the government department.

In its provisional summary of the case, the state prosecution has criticised the bank for failing to check up on the death of the woman’s father, as is required under Spanish law.

If convicted the woman is convicted of the fraud charges, she faces a prison sentence of six years as well as a possible fine of €4,320, as well as returning the pension in full.

In a separate case in Malaga this week, a local court condemned a 50-year-old woman to 21 months in prison for using her dead grandfather’s savings account book to appropriate his widower’s pension of €90,500, over a period of more than a decade.